The recent emergence of multi-screen social TV is dramatically transforming the TV experience. First, the traditional “lean backward” video watching experience (i.e. passive consumption of video content) has been integrated with a “lean forward” experience, implying a deeper engagement with the content, such as a social networking experience. Second, social TV aims to offer ubiquitous services which are available at any time, on any device, at an affordable price. Thirdly, with the significant growth of media consumption across multiple screens, users may want to transfer ongoing sessions from one device to another without interruption of video streaming.
However, existing systems suffer from significant limitations. For example, with regard to the transfer of ongoing sessions from one device to another, one proposal by Apple Inc. allows a single session running on a first device to be migrated to a second device (but not for transfer in a reverse direction). Furthermore, large scale deployment of multi-screen social TV is very limited.
Advertising is one of the major ways to make revenue for the content providers (i.e., TV stations, social networks, websites, etc.). Leveraging social networks can better take advantage of the users' demographic information and target their ads appropriately. There are presently two ways to distribute advertisements over social networks:    1) Embedding online advertisements into social networking website (e.g., facebook, weibo). However, this approach does not really make use of the social relationships of each user. As a result, it cannot provide better advertising effectiveness than other online advertising methods.    2) The users deliberately share advertisements on their social network, so that their friends can view the shared advertising. However, this approach requires massive user operations (e.g., finding the URL of advertisement, creating a new page and editing it), thus degrading the user experience.
The integration of TV experience and social networking is increasingly popular nowadays. However, currently, it is not an easy task for users to share real-time TV program information over personal social networks. First, the users have to deliberately take a few photos in front of the TV screen. Then they use some graphics editing tools (e.g., Photoshop) to synthesize those images into a new one (a “synthesis image”). Finally, they login to their social networking account and post the synthesis image manually. This approach requires a lot of user operations, thus significantly degrading the user experience and limiting its adoption rate.